When you think farmer – think female! FAO and UNDP are empowering women for a sustainable future
To bridge the gender gap, FAO and UNDP work with countries to empower women and achieve gender equality in the agriculture sector for a more sustainable future that will benefit all.
Women are key to food production. In developing countries, women comprise 45 percent of the agricultural labour force, with that figure rising to 60 percent in parts of Africa and Asia. They therefore play a fundamental role in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2 on Zero Hunger. However, female farmers have limited access to land, markets and education compared to men, and are not equally involved in decision-making. Studies show that if women had the same access to resources as men, food production would rise by almost 30 percent, potentially resulting in 150 million fewer hungry people in the world.
Women bear the brunt of climate change impacts
Considering the differences in roles and access to resources between men and women, climate change impacts on agriculture affect them in different ways.
In Viet Nam, for example, the majority of agricultural workers are women, as many men migrate to cities to find alternative jobs with more profitable incomes. It is thus mainly the women who experience the direct impacts of climate change in their daily lives. For instance, when sea level rise causes salt water to intrude and destroy whole fields of rice; food security and livelihoods are put at risk. Desperation grows and as described by a Vietnamese farmer in a similar situation: all she can do is pray. This is just one example of how climate change directly affects smallholder farmers, and much has been done to improve the situation.
Viet Nam is in fact one of 11 countries where FAO and UNDP worked in close collaboration with the government and other relevant stakeholders to tackle climate change, concentrating on issues related to gender, through the Integrating Agriculture in National Adaptation Plans (NAP-Ag) programme, funded by the German Ministry of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) through its International Climate Initiative (IKI).
New knowledge improves gender mainstreaming
For the past six years (2015-2020), the NAP-Ag programme supported countries to address challenges and priorities of both women and men in adaptation planning in agriculture, with a major part of its activities focused on monitoring sex disaggregated data and gender mainstreaming. This was done by conducting climate risk and vulnerability assessments and developing multi-criteria approaches to screen adaptation options focused on gender and vulnerable populations. The programme was not only able to promote women’s participation in activities related to agriculture and climate change planning, but also to integrate gender-sensitive adaptation options in countries’ climate change strategies and plans.